mind. He was
thoughtful beyond his years, although not conspicuously forward in the
school studies. He was already inclined to consider games as childish.
He looked down upon his companions and the school life generally as
silly and frivolous. The boys resented his contempt of their ways; and
his want of sociability and rather heavy exterior at the time made him a
natural butt for schoolboy wit. He was, he says, bullied and tormented
till, towards the end of his time, he plucked up spirit to resist. Of
the bullying there can be no doubt; nor (sooner or later) of the
resistance. Mr. Coleridge observes that he was anything but a passive
victim, and turned fiercely upon the ringleaders of his enemies.
'Often,' he adds, 'have I applauded his backhanders as the foremost in
the fray. He was only vanquished by numbers. His bill for hats at
Sanders' must have amounted to a stiff figure, for my visions of
Fitzjames are of a discrowned warrior, returning to Windsor bareheaded,
his hair moist with the steam of recent conflict.' My own childish
recollections of his school life refer mainly to pugilism. In October
1842, as I learn from my mother's diary, he found a big boy bullying me,
and gave the boy such a thrashing as was certain to prevent a repetition
of the crime. I more vividly recollect another occasion, when a strong
lad was approaching me with hostile intent. I can still perceive my
brother in the background; when an application of the toe of his boot
between the tails of my tyrant's coat disperses him instantaneously into
total oblivion. Other scenes dimly rise up, as of a tumult in the
school-yard, where Fitzjames was encountering one of the strongest boys
in the school amidst a delighted crowd, when the appearance of the
masters stopped the proceedings. Fitzjames says that in his sixteenth
year (i.e. 1844-5) he grew nearly five inches, and instead of outgrowing
his strength became a 'big, powerful young man, six feet high,'--and
certainly a very formidable opponent.

Other boys have had similar experiences without receiving the same
impression. 'I was on the whole,' he says, 'very unhappy at Eton, and I
deserved it; for I was shy, timid, and I must own cowardly. I was like a
sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys.' After speaking of
his early submission to tyranny, he adds: 'I still think with shame and
self-contempt of my boyish weakness, which, however, did not continue
in later years. The process taught